“Oh, dash these explanations, George!” he cried; “You only make things
look rottener than they are. It’s your way. It isn’t a case of figures.
We’re all right—there’s only one thing we got to do.”
“Yes?”
“Show value, George. That’s where this quap comes in; that’s why I fell
in so readily with what you brought to me week before last. Here we
are, we got our option on the perfect filament, and all we want’s
canadium. Nobody knows there’s more canadium in the world than will go
on the edge of a sixpence except me and you. Nobody has an idee the
perfect filament’s more than just a bit of theorising. Fifty tons of
quap and we’d turn that bit of theorising into something. We’d make the
lamp trade sit on its tail and howl. We’d put Ediswan and all of ’em
into a parcel without last year’s trousers and a hat, and swap ’em off
for a pot of geraniums. See? We’d do it through Business Organisations,
and there you are! See? Capern’s Patent Filament!
“The Ideal and the Real! George, we’ll do it! We’ll bring it off! And
then we’ll give such a facer to Boom, he’ll think for fifty years. He’s
laying up for our London and African meeting. Let him. He can turn the
whole paper on to us. He says the Business Organisations shares aren’t
worth fifty-two and we quote ’em at eighty-four. Well, here we are
gettin’ ready for him—loading our gun.”
His pose was triumphant.
“Yes,” I said, “that’s all right. But I can’t help thinking where
should we be if we hadn’t just by accident got Capern’s Perfect
Filament. Because, you know it was an accident—my buying up that.”
He crumpled up his nose into an expression of impatient distaste at my
unreasonableness.
“And after all, the meeting’s in June, and you haven’t begun to get the
quap! After all, we’ve still got to load our gun.”
“They start on Toosday.”
“Have they got the brig?”
“They’ve got a brig.”
“Gordon-Nasmyth!” I doubted.
“Safe as a bank,” he said. “More I see of that man the more I like him.
All I wish is we’d got a steamer instead of a sailing ship.”
“And,” I went on, “you seem to overlook what used to weigh with us a
bit. This canadium side of the business and the Capern chance has
rushed you off your legs. After all—it’s stealing, and in its way an
international outrage. They’ve got two gunboats on the coast.”